NOTES for Co2 3:6
In these words the apostle Paul compares the Old and New Covenants, and the letter in this case serves as a symbol of the written old law. Why does the apostle claim that written law is a deadly thing? And what if the law is right and just? In fact, Old Testament legislation contains good, necessary, and right laws. But once written, law becomes a kind of objective reality, separated both from the one who fulfills it and, most importantly, from the lawgiver. The point is not that no written law can exhaust the many-sidedness of real life, though that is obvious. Rather, it is an impersonal thing governing the life of those whom God endowed with the image and likeness of His personal being, and therefore it is a humiliation of that image and likeness. It is no accident that in the period before the New Testament the idea of the Wisdom of God arises in Israel - a personification of the law that constitutes its living meaning, its spirit. The words about Wisdom in the Bible turn out to be prophecies about Christ, because they reflect God's will to become directly the Ruler of His Kingdom.
By contrast, the Spirit of the eternally New Covenant gives its participants the possibility of being not under the authority of stone tablets, but under the authority of the Lawgiver personally. This does not mean at all that, say, different moral demands are made of them than of the participants in the Sinai Covenant. "I did not come to destroy the law, but to fulfill it," says the Lord Himself. But these demands do not constitute the essence of human life. Their fulfillment becomes a function, a manifestation of personal relations with the Lawgiver. After the words about the deadliness of the letter and the life-giving power of the Spirit, the apostle speaks at length about the glory of the Old and New Covenants. The biblical meaning of the word "glory" (Greek δόξα, Latin gloria) is seen most vividly in Isaiah's vision: "and the glory of the Lord filled the temple." This is a form of God's presence in which a person knows and blesses that presence. And it is precisely because of this that the fullness of such glory in the New Covenant proves qualitatively greater than in the letters of the Old law.